In addition to death and destruction, natural calamities cause enormous distress among survivors. It needs huge physical, mental and emotional resource to cope with agonies and anxieties that disasters leave behind. Since the poor, the weak, the marginalized and the externalized sections of population have to invest all their energy in ensuring survival, catastrophes turn into opportunities for the elite to perpetuate themselves.Little is known about the havoc that the August Earthquakes of 1833 left behind in its wake in Kathmandu. However, Mukhtiar Bhimsen Thapa began to lose his hold as the old guard of the royal court hit back upon him with full force. The Mukhtiar had to ultimately end his life in mysterious and horrifying circumstances within few years. Humiliation of Suguali Treaty (1814-1816) had rankled, but it was the wrath of the earth that probably helped seal the fate of one of the most powerful Gorkhali chieftains in history.
Recall of Nepal-Bihar Earthquake of 1934 have faded but not altogether disappeared from public memory. Juddha Shamsher used the chance to entrench himself in Singha Durbar. Among other things, he commissioned the rebuilding of Dharahara—perhaps the only monument erected anywhere in the world by losers of a war to mark their defeat—after the quakes to assert the fact that pomposity mattered more than generosity in the annals of history.
In the grand-old tradition of his forebears and in-laws, King Mahendra feasted upon agonies of Madheshis as the central and eastern Tarai-Madhesh were repeatedly hit by floods and famines in the 1960s. Madheshis had always been outsiders in power struggles of Kathmandu court, Mahendra ensured that they shall remain so forever through the manufacture of Mahendramala chauvinism that standardized Gorkhali communalism as Nepali nationalism.
The Sixteen Point Stratagem—the Six Post for short—follows well established tradition of ruling elites using natural calamities to consolidate their control over reins of the state. The Draft Constitution doing the rounds these days seeks to present a blatantly extra-constitutional, patently illegal, demonstrably undesirable, perceptibly immoral and potentially dangerous document as the done deal—fait accompli—in order to show who really swivels the wheels of power in the republican order of the erstwhile kingdom.
Raw Power
In one of its many definitions, power is the capacity of influencing behavior of others and altering outcomes according to one's preferences and will. When understood in that sense, the real strength of the powerful group or person can only be tested in its manifest misuse. In an interim order, the court ruled that the Six Post had violated explicit provisions of the Interim Constitution. Signatories of pact hit back at the court in turn and chose to ignore its strictures altogether. Apparently there is too much at stake to let niceties of constitutionalism come in the way of a sweet deal.
The essence of the Six Post lies buried in the middle of the verbose agreement which seeks to reelect the President, the Vice-President, the Prime Minister, the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker after the promulgation of the new constitution. The sixth post—the Chief Executive of the proposed post-earthquake reconstruction authority—was perhaps left dangling to lure influential players exercising considerable authority in society from outside party politics.
Had everything gone according to the grand design, there would have been a new Nepali Congress nominee in Shital Niwas. Balkhu Palace would have had its third republican premier at Baluwatar Complex. A Maoist would have been holding the gavel of the Speaker. The probability of a mannequin Madheshi duly dressed in starched Labeda-Suruwal being paraded as the Vice or Deputy was equally high, in which case the other post would have gone to yet another beneficiary of tokenism from the so-called civil society. The dealmakers had assumed that the possibility of their stratagem being questioned was next to nil during the exhaustion of post-quake monsoons.
The technocratic elite of Kathmandu were salivating at the prospect of billions of dollars flowing into the capital city in the name of post-quake rescue, relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction. The nobility had plans of building weekend homes in districts surrounding the Valley from compensations that they expected to receive for abandoned houses in the countryside. The diplomatic community was packing its bags for the summer vacation. The media had already been co-opted in the name of national interest.
The military, the mandarins, the merchants comprising of banker-builder-broker and business nexus, the mendicants of the Hindutva variety and the mediators of the comfortable classes masquerading as the civil society—the pillars of the PEON that once kept the monarchy propped up—perhaps decided that the onset of floods in the plains and landslides in the hills precluded any chance of meaningful opposition to whatever they chose to thrust upon the country in the name of constitution. All that they wanted to ensure through the statute was that the Six Posts shall never go to any Madheshi, Janjati or Dalit with a straight backbone.
Ripening process
Perhaps the Six Post is being allowed to unravel by design. Adoption of parliamentary system in the draft may have been meant to be publically ridiculed before being dumped in favor of an elected monarchy. It's elementary that the sole custodian of people's sovereignty, whether selected through the race of Lig Lig Kot in Gorkha or elected to the post in the way Pushpa Kamal Dahal was in Siraha is immaterial, ends up becoming either an instrument of the PEON or turns into a tyrant. In both cases, the dominant community benefits at the cost of the minorities and the marginalized.
The supposed debate over secularism is an even bigger farce. Any modern state can have only one religion—constitutionalism. It is a concept that combines the best of traditions, modernity, ethics and morality of societies that choose to adopt it for shared existence and common aspirations. For reasons arising out of European experiences of contestations between the church and the crown, the idea came to be called laïcité or secularity to keep temporal and spiritual spheres separate.
Islam recognizes either the Ummah (supra-national community of believers) or the Sha'b (national community with common ancestry or geography) and many Muslims continue to look upon secularity as merely a mask of dominant religions in countries where they are in a minority. Nepal needs secularism to protect Hinduism from itself: What else can stop the Dalits, the so-called Shudras, and even the self-claimed high-caste women from deserting the faith en masse to escape from structural tyrannies of the Brahminical order? Freedom of faith is all very well, but only secularism forces religious zealots to continually reinvent themselves and do mundane things such as running free schools and charity hospitals rather than holding enumerable Koti Homs that consume enormous energy of the community, breeds fatalism, and feeds upon as well as produce what has been called the 'dung of the devil'—capitalism. Paradoxical as it may seem, only secularism can ensure the relevance of religiosity in the twenty-first century.
False pretenses over federalism too are probably being circulated to erect a façade: A rough demarcation is perhaps ready to divide the country in such a way that no Madheshi or Janjati will ever be able to govern a province without accepting to be mere proxy of the PEON in Kathmandu. With district boundaries remaining intact, Madheshis that form over one-third of national population shall have to learn to live with being an insignificant minority in the central parliament.
Will the deception of such a massive scale—fooling all the people for a very long-long time—work? It is hard to say. The Malinowskians in Kathmandu seem convinced that the promise of paani (water) and jawani (cheap labor) of mountains will ensure the silence of the Indian Establishment. The Chinese will keep quiet as long as their direct interests in the Himalayas are secure. The West will stand, watch and make some polite noises. Unless there is a strategic or material stake, no outside power ever deems it fit to speak for the minorities anywhere in the world.
For now, the PEON has clearly triumphed. Future of the draft statute, however, appears less certain: It's extremely unlikely that the Madhesh will succumb so easily all over again.
Related story
Japan’s ruling party elects Sanae Takaichi as new leader, likel...
-1774196637.webp)
